Why (not) Smalltalk?

A coincidence that on Sam Ruby’s blog and on the Extreme Programming Yahoo Group on the same day there are conversations about using Smalltalk. Both conversations are along the lines of... OK, Smalltalk is very good. So why use a language...

Irony

There’s some unintentional irony in the slide deck that Sam Ruby posted from his FOSSSL talk. The slides are interesting - it’s clear to me that dynamic languages are finally getting noticed by the mainstream. The irony? The fact that, just as one...

Smalltalk Irony

jarober posted this to comp.lang.smalltalk You have to love the irony here: 1) IBM drops Smalltalk, handing it to Instantiations: www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/smalltalk/transition.html 2) Another part of IBM, focused on syndication technology,...

"Kind of functional style"

Brian McAllister commented on my last post, and basically agreed with me that it‘s not easy to talk about this technique, due to the labelling problem. Brian‘s variant is to call it a “kind of functional style“, but notes...

@Andy: There’s a difference between thinking that something looks unusual and thinking that’s a barrier to it’s use. I’ve nothing against Smalltalk’s syntax myself: I quite like it, really. Still, it’s just that bit too different from what everybody’s used to to have encouraged its adoption. Pity, really.

Sat 24 Sep 2005

Ruby Friday

I have written about Scheme my last two times out, so I figured I should give some love to another of my favorite languages. Like many folks these days, I am a big fan of Ruby. I took a Ruby tutorial at OOPSLA several years ago from Dave Thomas and...

Tue 11 Oct 2005

Sun 25 Dec 2005

Weird Syntax and Language Adoption

In Sam Ruby’s comments (it’s old, but I only just noticed): “If programming languages are Reinventing Smalltalk, why don’t we just use Smalltalk?” Keith said: Because Smalltalk’s got a weirdass syntax. well, that attitude cost me years of what...